


knocking on heaven's door

by callunavulgari



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-22 07:03:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19662241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: “Just, get in the fucking car. I’ll drive you home.”Billy looked at him, very seriously, and said, “What if I don’t want to go home?”And Steve said back, “Where do you want to go?”





	knocking on heaven's door

**Author's Note:**

> Post season 3. Spoilers within, obviously. I'm all for fix it fics, but sometimes you just need to write about grief.

“Do you think you might like boys?” Robin asks him one night.

Steve is nineteen years old. Some kid just spilled skittles all over the tiled floor in front of the register. He is holding a broom and dustpan in one hand like he’s about to take them into war.

He’d been talking about some movie. He's not sure which one.

She’s looking at him like she already knows the answer, like she’s just waiting for him to realize.

He licks his lips and ducks his head, shuffling from foot to foot. Between his feet, brightly colored candies skitter across the floor. He doesn’t think about the summer heat on his shoulders, of smoke on his breath and a hand, calloused and warm against his chest.

He shrugs. Swallows. Doesn’t say anything.

Doesn’t have to.

They gave him a gravestone. It’s small and square, steely gray and jutting up out of the grass, like it's just daring someone to trip over it. Steve finds Max there two weeks after the funeral.

It’s raining, just starting to drizzle. There’s a lightning bug perched on the embellished H, gleaming bright in the dark.

She blinks up at him and squints a little, shades her eyes like the sun is still gleaming above him.

Steve doesn’t say anything, just tucks his feet under him and sits.

It’s quiet. The drizzle starts to become a little more, lightning flashing overhead.

“Why are you here?” she asks him after a while.

He looks at her. She’s got a blade of grass in her hands, carefully picking it apart.

He shrugs.

“You weren’t friends.”

It isn’t a question.

He shrugs again, shakes a little when he reaches into his pocket for a pack of smokes. She wrinkles her nose at him when he lights it, but doesn’t protest, just watches as he cups his hand around the flame and brings it to the tip of the cigarette he’s got tucked between his teeth.

The smoke streams out between his lips. It feels like it’s choking him.

“You _weren’t_ friends,” she says again, her eyes narrowed. Like she would have known.

And maybe she would have.

They weren’t close.

Billy had said that to Steve before, one time when they were alone in his car. They were in the parking lot of the arcade and Steve had his feet up on the dash, the chair reclined back until it was nearly touching the backseat. Billy had looked at him over the rim of his shades and rolled his eyes, but hadn’t knocked his feet down.

“No,” Steve says.

“Then why are you here?” Her eyes are hard, accusatory. Her hair and cheeks are wet.

Steve clenches his fist in the grass laid overtop Billy’s grave, and lets the smoke out through his teeth.

“Because I miss him.”

They _weren’t_ friends. They never were. But sometimes, Steve slid into Billy’s car after school and Billy didn’t kick him right back out again. He drove instead, one hand on the steering wheel, the other on the seat behind Steve’s head.

He drove fast, turned the music up loud, and would laugh whenever Steve flinched.

He was a dick. But he liked Steve, and despite himself, Steve liked him back.

“You’ve done this before,” Robin tells him the first time that they smoke weed together. They’re in the parking lot behind the local McDonald's and Steve’s got a half-eaten hamburger in one hand.

Steve snorts. “Obviously.”

“Didn’t think you partied that way, that’s all,” Robin says with a shrug, swishing a fry through her shake. Strawberry, like the streak of color she’s got through her hair. He’d put the color there himself, curled up on her bathroom floor with her, the tub of dye clutched between his thighs, his hands itchy beneath the plastic gloves.

“Didn’t, really,” he says, taking another bite of the burger. A pickle slides out and into his lap, so he scoops it up and plops it back into his mouth. He talks with his mouth half full of masticated beef. “Tommy liked to drink. My dad had lots of booze.”

She passes the joint back to him. “So, how’d you start smoking?”

Steve chews, staring out into the distance. The sun is high overhead and the back of his neck is sweating. He takes a slow drag, holds the sweet smoke in as long as he can before he lets it go.

“Billy,” he says, because it’s not a secret anymore, if it ever was.

She shifts, and he can feel all her attention zeroing in on him, sizing him up.

“Billy,” she repeats.

Steve doesn’t look at her. “Yep.”

“Like… Billy Hargrove.”

He bobs his head in a jerky nod. Takes another bite.

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see her brows furrow together. She’s trying to put it together now, trying to remember whenever they might have hung out at school. Or after. “Were you two close?”

He snorts, passing the joint back her way. “No.”

“Then when…?”

Steve sighs. He jumps down off the back of her car, chucking the rest of the burger and it’s wrapper in the general direction of the trashcan. He misses by miles and the burger spills out onto the asphalt. A hungry bird immediately descends upon it, picking at the soggy bun with its pointy beak.

“We hung out sometimes,” he says with a short, nonchalant shrug of his shoulders. He finally glances her way, unsurprised to find her staring back at him. He fidgets. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Are you sure?” she asks.

  
The first time that he and Billy spent any amount of time together, Steve nearly killed him.

It wasn’t on purpose. He’d been driving, and Billy, for once, wasn’t.

He was lying in the middle of the road, some backwoods drive that never seemed to get any traffic. But Steve lived in basically the middle of nowhere, big house in the middle of the damn woods. Long winding drives, very scenic in the fall.

Steve almost hadn’t seen him in time. He’d been distracted by something - his hair in the mirror, the radio - and hadn’t seen Billy until he was coming right up on him. The tires had squealed when he jerked on the wheel, and his car had gone spinning off into the grass, steaming.

“Are you fucking crazy?!” Steve had shouted, wild-eyed, half out the window.

Billy lifted his head up off the concrete, stared Steve down. Said, “Maybe.”

Steve stared at him for a long minute. It was February, too cold for Billy to be out, much less lying in some road in the middle of nowhere. The radio played on. Everything smelled overwhelmingly of burnt rubber. The way Steve figured, he had two options. He could drive off and leave Billy to his death wish, or he could get out of the goddamn car.

He got out of the damn car. Stomped over to Billy and stood over his head, feet planted firmly apart.

Billy raised an eyebrow at him. His left eye was swollen, black, little capillaries burst above his cheekbone.

“Nice stance, Harrington,” he said, taking a drag of his cigarette.

“Thanks,” Steve hissed back. “Some asshole told me to plant my feet.”

Billy laughed, and looked at Steve again. He seemed very sober, to be playing chicken in the middle of the street.

“Do you actually have a goddamn death wish or do you just get off on shit like this?” Steve asked him, still seething.

Billy grinned at him. “Maybe I just get off on seeing that pretty face.”

Steve glared. “Where’s your car?”

A shrug.

“How’d you _get here_?”

Another shrug, this one jerkier, like it stung a bit. “Obviously somebody dropped me off. Clearly wanted to teach me a lesson.”

And that - there was something about his voice. The bite to it. That bitter edge.

“Just, get in the fucking car. I’ll drive you home.”

Billy looked at him, very seriously, and said, “What if I don’t want to go home?”

And Steve said back, “Where do you want to go?”

Steve doesn’t go to the funeral. Max is there, all the kids are there, a dead-eyed Joyce with an arm wrapped around an equally dead-eyed Eleven is there. But Steve doesn’t go. Instead, he crawls in through Billy’s window.

The room still smells like him. Cigarettes and expensive cologne. Dryer sheets. A faint, barely there reek of weed.

Steve sits on his bed for a long time, staring around him. The half-naked models on the wall, the skin mags in the bedside drawer, the floor length mirror propped up on some plastic crates. All carefully constructed, such an elaborate display of teenage masculinity.

Steve runs the pads of his fingers over well-worn sheets. They’re blue, dark. Soft. He curls his fingers in them, then he pulls Billy’s pillow into his lap, and screams into it as loudly as he can.

There’s nobody home, no one to hear him.

 _Nobody will hear you_ , he hears in his ears. A ghost. An echo. A memory. The feel of these same sheets clenched between white-knuckled fingers. Billy’s grinning face above his, coaxing and almost sweet, purring, _That’s it, baby. Scream for me._

Steve screams for him.

Somewhere in Hawkins, Billy is being lowered into the ground.

He’s sitting on Billy’s grave again.

Max is there. She’s cut her hair short, hacked off to just above her shoulders. It’s curling around her ears. There’s a new earring in one lobe, spiky and familiar.

It isn’t raining this time. The sun is bright, bloated, hanging heavy in the sky.

She’s watching him.

“So,” she says, taking a careful seat next to him. He shifts a little, makes room for her on the grass beside him. “You miss him?”

Steve nods. He wants to trace the letters on the grave. The name. Just a name. He doesn’t think they’d had the money for anything more detailed. No beloved brother, or cherished son. Just a name and a couple of dates.

“Tell me about him,” she says.

“We weren’t friends,” he tells her, like a warning.

Her eyes are dark. “Then what were you?”

He shrugs, then gives into the urge and leans forward, tracing the jagged edges of the name. The gravestone is hot under his hands, the stone soaking up the heat of the midday sun. He licks his lips.

“Something,” he says. “For a while, anyway. We were something.”


End file.
